Global OPEX Leader - Operations Excellence

What you’ll do:

PRIMARY FUNCTION:

About Golf Pride

For five generations, Golf Pride® has been the global leader in golf grips. Throughout our history, Golf Pride® has believed in the importance of developing the best performing, most innovative grips for the world's best golfers and amateurs alike. As the only brand that touches every golfer, we are obsessed with the connectedness of the hands to the club, and this inspires every Golf Pride employee in everything we do. Now entering our 75th year, Golf Pride is returning to the category disruption roots that got us started as we enter our next growth phase. While we may be #1, you should expect to see many parallels to a brand reinventing itself as we drive the change management needed to secure our desired transformation.

About The Position
At Golf Pride, Operational Excellence is the discipline that connects strategy to execution, builds the systems and capabilities that allow us to scale, and creates the organizational muscle to get better every day.

As Golf Pride's Global Operational Excellence Manager, you will be the senior-most leader of the Continuous Improvement and EHS functions and a member of the Global Operations Leadership Team, reporting to the Director of Global Operations. You will set the vision, standards, and capability roadmap for both functions. Plant teams and functional leaders look to this role for direction: you own what great CI and EHS look like; our plants and functions own daily execution and local implementation.

CI and EHS are distinct disciplines with different tools and technical demands. But they share a common leadership philosophy: both require building systems that sustain themselves, coaching leaders to own outcomes, and creating cultures where people identify problems, surface risk, and build strong process to improve performance every day. This role leads both because the leadership approach is the same.

Your Continuous Improvement charter spans two equally important priorities:
Manufacturing Process Improvement: Partner with plant teams in Thailand and Taiwan to develop and execute strategies that reduce lead times, lower product cost, and drive measurable P&L impact.

Business Process Improvement: Partner with functional leaders across Golf Pride (Commercial, Innovation, Operations, HR, and Finance) to document and strengthen processes across the business.

Your EHS charter is to set the strategy, talent plan, and capability roadmap for Environmental Health and Safety at Golf Pride, driving world-class safety. Your mandate is to build a culture where safety is deeply embedded in how work gets done, where employees identify and act on risk, leaders model the right behaviors, and safety is valued over speed or output.

Across both functions, you are a coach. You champion lean thinking and safety leadership across every part of the organization, not by owning the work, but by developing the leaders and teams around you to build, own, and continuously improve the processes and practices they run every day. Your goal is to make Golf Pride safer, simpler, and easier to run as we grow.

What you can expect:

Define Operational Excellence Strategy and Standards: Build and deploy a unified framework that spans continuous improvement and EHS, connecting manufacturing operations, business processes, and safety systems under a shared set of standards, assessments, and capability milestones. Plants and functions execute against this framework; you own its design, evolution, and integrity.

Drive Manufacturing Process Improvement: Lead division-wide initiatives to reduce lead time and improve manufacturing efficiency, targeting 3% year-over-year productivity gains visible in P&L results. Partner with plant teams to deploy lean tools, conduct Value Stream Mapping, and execute rapid improvement events aligned to the CI roadmap.

Drive Business Process Improvement: Partner with functional leaders across Golf Pride to identify, prioritize, and redesign business processes that create friction or limit scalability. Lead cross-functional improvement initiatives, from order-to-cash and new product introduction to planning, reporting, and decision-making workflows, that make Golf Pride easier to operate as we grow.

Build a World-Class Safety Culture: Define and deploy the systems, behaviors, and routines that make safety part of how work gets done every day. Build an environment where hazards are actively identified, risks are surfaced early. Set clear expectations for safety outcomes across all sites, drive rigorous follow-through on incidents and near-misses, and ensure learning is translated into sustained process and behavior change.

Lead Assessments and Framework Deployment: Drive annual MESH, ELSS, OpA, and EBS self-assessments across the division, create action plans from findings, and serve as Lead Assessor for Operations Assessments (OpA). Extend assessment and maturity thinking to business processes and safety systems where applicable.

Build Functional Capability Across the Organization: Grow the CI and EHS organizations globally, partnering with site teams in Taiwan and Thailand on staffing and talent development. Establish CI and Safety Councils to share best practices and build expertise. Deploy structured problem-solving, lean thinking, and safety leadership as shared competencies that all functions can leverage.

Partner Across Functions to Drive Business Impact: Collaborate across the business (Commercial, Innovation, Operations, HR, Finance, Legal) to integrate CI and EHS priorities with quality systems, engineering projects, new product launches, and commercialization timelines. Ensure investments are tied to business outcomes, not just functional metrics.

Who you are:

You are a systems-minded leader who builds the processes, safety culture, and organizational capabilities that allow a business to scale. You are equally comfortable leading a Kaizen event on the factory floor, facilitating a cross-functional team redesigning a business process, and coaching a plant leader on safety leadership routines. You have built CI and/or EHS capability in organizations where it didn't exist or wasn't mature, and you know how to earn credibility with both plant teams and corporate functions while setting a higher bar.

You bring:

•    A transformation mindset. You see Operational Excellence as a strategic capability to be built across the entire business, not a set of manufacturing tools or a compliance checklist. You design systems that sustain improvement and safety performance beyond any single event, initiative, or audit cycle.
•    Breadth across manufacturing and business processes. You are as effective improving an order-to-cash workflow as you are optimizing a production line. You see waste and opportunity everywhere.
•    A culture-focused approach to safety. You believe safety is created through behavior, systems, and leadership, not rules alone. You build environments where employees speak up, challenge risk, and take ownership of how work is done.
•    Systems thinking that drives learning, not blame. You approach process failures and safety incidents through root cause and system design, strengthening processes and leadership routines so the organization continuously improves over time.
•    Global perspective. You can harmonize functional best practices across diverse sites, cultures, and functions. Asia experience is a strong plus.
•    Strong leadership presence. You build trust, develop talent, hold teams accountable, and drive results through both direct leadership and indirect influence.
•    Business acumen. You connect improvement work to P&L impact, commercialization speed, and customer value, not just operational efficiency.
•    Strong communication skills. You present strategy and analysis with clarity and impact at all levels.
•    A bias for action. Structured thinking paired with pragmatic decisions that deliver real results.

Qualifications:

•    Bachelor's degree required; MBA preferred.
•    7+ years in continuous improvement, EHS, and/or operations management; multi-site experience preferred. Experience improving both manufacturing and business processes strongly preferred. EHS leadership experience preferred.
•    Technical CI Expertise: Deep knowledge of Lean, Six Sigma, systems thinking, and daily management. Experience deploying CI roadmaps and maturity frameworks across manufacturing and business functions. Lean certification and Six Sigma Green Belt required; Black Belt preferred.
•    EHS Expertise: Familiarity with safety management systems, behavioral safety programs, incident investigation, and regulatory frameworks. Experience building safety culture in manufacturing environments preferred.
•    Tools & Data: Proficiency with PowerPoint, Excel, Minitab, Visio, and SharePoint. Strong analytical skills, both qualitative and quantitative.
•    Process Leadership: Proven ability to facilitate assessments (MESH, ELSS, OpA, EBS), lead cross-functional improvement events, and align CI and EHS strategy with business objectives.
•    Collaboration & Communication: Demonstrated ability to influence senior stakeholders, coach practitioners, and translate improvement work into business outcomes.
•    Ability to travel internationally as business requires, approximately 25%.
•    Passion for golf and understanding of the golfer's experience preferred.